To be or not to be... cured ~ A Reaction Paper on the "Rhetoric of Cancer"

Cancer, a disease which involves the different cells of our body wherein they grow and multiply completely deviated from its natural rate. Despite the evolution of medical science, we still cannot fully treat the said disease. It takes time for us to identify whether a person is suffering from one. And in the occurrence that a malignant neoplasm is discovered, it is not guaranteed that it will be cured. Thus, people who give strength and help those suffering from the said disease are worthy of praise and respect. However, what if you, the person helping them did not expect to catch the disease as well?

People who discover that they are afflicted by cancer always find it hard to come out for they associate it to something shameful or people should not know about. Due of this, their treatment is delayed and by the time the doctors find out about it, it is either already too late, on a high stage like stage 2 or 3 already, or there are already some complications on their other organs aside from the origin.

In the podcast, the speaker also had cancer. He thought of hiding it like most people as mentioned earlier. He panicked, afraid of what could happen to him in the future. After some deep thinking, he did something completely unusual. Instead of battling the disease with the aim of eliminating it from his body, he chose to “embrace” it. He came across an idea that what he is doing is “battling against himself” which urged him to completely accept it like what St. Francis of Assisi and a priest that he consulted with did. But despite all of this, he did not want to have the disease, rather, we can say that he’s doing is to approach it “naturally”.


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